Where was the ECB when all this happened?

The recent Nyberg report which blamed everyone, and no-one, for the banking debacle omitted mentioning one institution. The European Central Bank (or Europaische Zentralbank as it is called in its native language) took over a number activities from the national central banks when we joined the Euro. One of the tasks of the ECB/EZB is to monitor the Euro area banking sector to identify any vulnerabilities and to check the resilience of the system.

If the ECB had been carrying out its assessments competently, it should have noticed that the growth in credit provided by Irish banks, and therefore the indebtedness of bank customers, vasttly exceeded the growth in the economy in Ireland. This apparently is a basic measure of economic prudence.  There is no mention of this in the 2008 Financial Stability Reports which suggests that it was not regarded as important or was not noticed at all.

This oversight by the ECB in no way absolves our regulators of blame but it is interesting that our fiercest critic and harshest taskmaster in the bailout has a lot less entitlement to the moral high ground than it currently claims.